Particle Accelerators Are Kind of Sweet
Particle accelerators. They are something you may or may not have known or heard about before. I didn’t know a lot about them either.
But, this past year, I started to see some buzz online (mostly on Tik-Tok and Youtube). This buzz stems from The Large Hadron Collider (the largest particle accelerator in the world), which reopened after a few years of refurbishments and renovations. A lot of posts say something along the lines of “reality is going to be destroyed,” or they would reference Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse, which is a famous movie that was released a few years back that has a particle accelerator type machine that breaks reality.
To be fair, a lot of these posts were done in a joking manner. However, the message was still evident through the videos and comments that a lot of people don't know what a particle accelerator is or what it does.
That’s why I want to explain what it is and why it is nothing to be afraid of. And, more importantly, why it’s super cool.
To start off, a particle accelerator is a machine that channels elementary particles, such as electrons and protons, and subsequently speeds these particles up. Typically, this involves crashing the particles into something or crashing them into each other. They do this in either a Linear Accelerator or a Circular Accelerator.
Photo by Yulia Buchatskaya on Unsplash
A linear accelerator accelerates small subatomic particles along a linear path, hence the name, using a magnetron to produce radio waves (microwave radiation) that cause the particles to speed up. These particles subsequently smash into a large metal piece that stops them.
Now some of you may be surprised to know that the linear accelerator is most often used to treat cancer. They have it set up so that the particles hit a tungsten slab which causes an x-ray beam to be directed out at the patient. This beam has pinpoint accuracy and can be aimed at any part of the body. This treatment is most commonly known as “radiation therapy.”
On the other hand, a circular accelerator is quite different and has a very different use. The circular accelerator accelerates particles along a circular path, causing them to contact a substance or another particle moving in the opposite direction. The circular accelerator causes particles to accelerate through various types of magnets that create an electric field that pushes the particles at high speeds–which are near the speed of light. The circular accelerator is primarily used for research, with the goal of learning more about particles and the laws of physics.
How does smashing particles into each other teach us anything?
Well, through smashing together, particles reveal the smaller particles that make up the particles themselves. Often people believe that the atom is the smallest particle. However ,the atom is made up of protons and neutrons, and electrons. Therefore, a proton is smaller than an atom.
Now the question is, “what is a proton made of?” Well, this is the question that is answered by smashing protons together. A proton is actually made of smaller particles called quarks. These quarks are so small that without particle accelerators, it would be near impossible to observe and learn about them properly.
Earlier I mentioned that atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. However, these particles are different from each other, as an electron is an elementary particle. This means that it is the smallest a particle can go. In other words, it’s similar to the inner and final layer of an onion, or think of it as the last doll in a Russian nesting doll. Unlike electrons, protons and neutrons are not elementary particles and instead are made up of elementary particles, which are known as quarks.
Any quark is an elementary particle, but not all elementary particles are the same. Now you might be thinking, why is this important?
Now that we know we are at the smallest layer of particles, we have to find out what gives the particles mass. This may seem strange as it’s almost redundant to think that a particle needs to get mass if it is already a particle. But, this is something that a particle accelerator can find out. During the last decade, we have used the particle accelerator to discover the Higgs Bozon. This fundamental particle helps make up the Higgs field–a field that is theorized to give elementary particles mass when they pass through it. It’s quite complicated, but I would recommend the Ted-Ed video by Dave Barney and Steve Goldfarb to give you more information.
As you can see, particle accelerators are nothing to be afraid of and are super cool. They can help teach us the building blocks of the world and give us a better understanding of the field of physics and all sciences as well. There is a ton of information about them online, so if you are interested, I implore you to do some more research.
